Wilfred Owens's powerful poem, "Dulce et decorum est", was about a group of battle weary soldiers coming back from the front lines to rest. Owen used similes to get across the reality of their situation, "Coughing like hags", "bent double like old beggars". These similes help make the poem a contradiction to the way soldiers were pictured traditionally. The opening stanza of the poem describes how the war has taken it's toll on their health because they were coming back from the front lines deaf, "Deaf, even to the hoots of tired, Five nines", and tiredly stumbling." Drunk with fatigue", is a metaphor that creates an image of the tired men staggering as if they are drunk. You are told how tired and exhausted the soldiers are when it says," men marched asleep".
The second stanza starts with three short exclamations, "Gas! GAS! Quick boys!" These exclamations catch our attention after the long, slow, first paragraph, "an ecstasy of fumbling", tells us that the men are panicking as they try and put on their gas masks quick enough to escape the deadly gas. "But someone was still yelling out and stumbling." All the soldiers except for one had managed to get their masks on in time. The one that didn't make it was panicking. "And floundering like a man in fire or lime." This simile tells us that, after breathing in the deadly mustard gas, the soldiers" lungs are burning as they would if the same had happened with fire or lime. When the poet wrote, "dim, through misty panes and thick green light." He is talking about the narrators view from underneath the gas mask. "As under a green sea, I saw him drowning." This simile tells us what the gas would have looked like through a gas mask and the soldier would have almost been drowning because his lungs were filling up with the gas and he was suffocation.
The two lines of the third stanza are describing the narrator and the soldier and the way there was nothing that either of the men could to to stop it happening.